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Using Mass Media and ICT for Agriculture Extension: A Case Study
INTRODUCTION AGRICULTURE is the main source of employment, livelihood and income in developing countries. The population depending upon agriculture in these countries is 50 to 90%, out of which a significant proportion of 70 – 95% are small farmers 1. The farmers in these countries face twin challenges; one to increase the growth of agriculture by adopting newer farm-technology and the other to get a reasonable price for their produce. Procuring inputs such as pesticides, fertilizers and ‘high technology’ seeds, present special problems and risks for poor farmers, and they need to borrow from lenders to make their purchases. Farmers and end- consumers are linked with a long value chain involving several stakeholders. This distance is increasing because of the poor agricultural marketing and profit seeking behavior of middle players involved in this chain. Inefficient agricultural production and marketing reflects poor dissemination of farm technology in these countries. Although excellent research is done at agricultural institutes, Agriculture Universities and government funded research centers, the dissemination is still not up to the mark and most of the research thesis only gets stored in libraries and don’t reach from lab to land. Further, ability of farmers to reach market through efficient network of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) which increases the farmers bargaining power and provides a chance to interact with trader and government agencies, is missing. This is more important in rural areas where the farmers are not able to realize the reasonable price for their produce. Agriculture innovation is key to the growth of agriculture sector. Innovation needs constant interaction of a multitude of agents and stakeholders such as farmers, extension workers, scientists, and in the present context mass media and ICT experts. An appropriate extension service should be able to cater to the needs of farmer's knowledge on technology, farm practices, farm productivity/ efficiency, technology adoption, farm output supply and demand 2. World Bank study acknowledged the importance of extension using radio 3. The role of ICT in agriculture extension was visualized long ago 4. Increase in ICT penetration has been found to have a direct relation with productivity and agriculture income. The agricultural income in many developing countries is consistent with the level of ICT penetration 5. In further studies, it was found that farmers were immensely benefitted with the availability of information on agriculture prices, products and attributes 6. The role of ICT and mass media to bridge the knowledge gap of services and quality inputs, quality production and safety standards, information of price and markets, post-harvest management was studied by Ferroni and Zhou 7. The inclination of farmers to use of ICT was analyzed by picking a random sample of seventy-five farmers for pre-tested structured interview. The finding showed that most of the farmers showed positive attitude towards use of ICT 8 Many developing countries are not making enough efforts to use ICT to boost the agriculture productivity. The World Bank in its study, released recently describes this as innovation paradox, wherein the developing countries are reluctant to use the new technologies to gain the benefit 9 AGRICULTURE IN INDIA Agriculture, with its allied sectors, is the largest livelihood provider in India, more so in the vast rural areas 10. Agriculture proper & Livestock, Forestry & Logging, Fishing and related activities contribute 17.9% to the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and account for $366.92 billion of national Using-Mass-Media-and-ICT-for-Agriculture-Extension-A-Case-Study.